Last year the Java Community Process turned 10 years old. Patrick Curran has published his review of the last year of activity in JSR Watch: Here's To Progress. In the article he discussed a number of issues from the JCP membership and leadership to JSR activity.

JSR Activity

One of the most interesting things for me is that in all of the 70 JSRs that are active right now, the majority of them are focussed on JavaME, which has 27. JavaSE has 20, which JavaEE has 15.

The JSR lifecycle is certainly varied, and it's good to see that the committee are committed to helping complete JSRs faster:

The time it took these JSRs to work their way through the process
varied from a little over one year for JSR 291 to five years for JSR
190. There are obviously lessons to be learned about how to - and how
not to - complete JSRs quickly, and we will investigate further over
the coming months.

Out of the 70 active JSRs, Sun (unsurprisingly) holds the Spec Lead role for most, at 27. They are followed by Nokia (11), Oracle (8), Motorola (5) and IBM (4). With Oracle buying out Sun, I guess that puts Oracle out front with 35. 50% spec leadership would give them a significant say in the future of Java.

New Initiatives

Probably one of the most important things for Java developers is that the Expert Groups are being encouraged to work in an open and transparent manner, and the Executive Committee are to do the same:

Starting in September 2008 the ECs agreed to make full minutes and
meeting materials accessible to the general public rather than simply
posting summaries that only JCP members could read. (We reserve the
right to go into Private Session from time to time when sensitive
matters are discussed, but we don't expect to do this very often.) If
you want to see what we're up to, the meeting materials are accessible.

Membership of the JCP has increased by 3%, with about a quarter of the members being corporations.

So, we've seen 10 years pass on the JCP now - are there any other changes that you would like to see happen? Does the JSR model still work?